It all started with a Big Bang: Scientists recreate sound in Hi-Fi

Big Bang remix! Scientists have devised an audio recreation of the Big Bang in high fidelity - that started our universe nearly 14 billion years ago. A decade ago, spurred by a question for a fifth-grade science project, University of Washington physicist John Cramer devised an audio recreation of the Big Bang. Now, armed with more sophisticated data from a satellite mission observing the cosmic microwave background a faint glow in the universe that acts as sort of a fossilised fingerprint of the Big Bang Cramer produced new recordings that fill in higher frequencies to create a fuller and richer sound. [caption id=“attachment_689354” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Image from Nasa[/caption] The sound files run from 20 seconds to a little longer than 8 minutes. The effect is similar to what seismologists describe as a magnitude 9 earthquake causing the entire planet to actually ring. In this case, however, the ringing covered the entire universe before it grew to such gargantuan proportions. “Space-time itself is ringing when the universe is sufficiently small,” Cramer said in university statement. Cramer used data from the cosmic microwave background on temperature fluctuations in the very early universe. The data on those wavelength changes were fed into a computer programme called Mathematica, which converted them to sound. A 100-second recording represents the sound from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang until until about 760,000 years after the Big Bang. “The original sound waves were not temperature variations, though, but were real sound waves propagating around the universe,” Cramer said. More complete data were recently gathered by an international collaboration using the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite mission, which has detectors so sensitive that they can distinguish temperature variations of a few millionths of a degree in the cosmic microwave background. That data were released in late March and led to the new recordings. As the universe cooled and expanded, it stretched the wavelengths to create “more of a bass instrument,” Cramer said. The sound gets lower as the wavelengths are stretched farther, and at first it gets louder but then gradually fades. The sound was, in fact, so “bass” that he had to boost the frequency 100 septillion times just to get the recordings into a range where they can be heard by humans. Associated Press